Ryan Joy (atxryan)

I received my brand new Macbook Pro from Apple less than three months ago. I was apprehensive about spending that much on a single machine that I didn’t know how to troubleshoot, upgrade, or really even take apart. I was a PC guy used to building my computers from barebones kits, but I figured it was worth it because the Apple hardware was so reliable.

Well… nothing’s perfect, I suppose.

This past weekend I experienced my first “kernel panic”. Nothing extraordinary was going on. There weren’t even that many applications open. Only Firefox, Twitterific, and Preview.

I restarted and opened up panic.log to try to see what was going on. It referenced an exception error with the touchpad. Uh-oh.

Crossing my fingers, I continued working hoping that it was a fluke and all was well in the world of Macbook. I was not so lucky. Over the next few days the kernel panics plagued my productivity. I tried isolating the issue, but it seemed to occur irregularly without rhyme or reason. Exception errors associated with the touchpad, IO bus, AT graphics, USB, and ATA to name a few. The inconsistency of errors and the fact that there were all over the map led me to conclude that I had a faulty logic board. Damn.

Finally I scheduled some time at the Genius Bar so that I could convince Apple to replace my logic board. It only took about 15 minutes of my time explaining the exception errors and going over my own attempts to isolate the issue before my friendly Genius agreed with me that it needed a new logic board. It’s now being diagnosed and repaired by Apple Support. I’ll see it again in 5-7 days.

It seems Jeremy Keith’s Macbook Pro and mine may have been separated at production. His laptop is also in the care of Apple support at the moment and his woes started almost the same day my own did.

I sincerely hope that both of our laptops come back in tip-top shape and that this is the last of our issues.

Update: Only hours after posting this entry I went to check my P.O. box and my laptop was there. Amazing. Everything seems to be working fine and no data was lost. I’m utterly impressed with the Apple support at this point. It was less than 48 hours ago that I took it to the Genius Bar!